THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY, APRIL 17, 1948. BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26748, 17 April 1948, Page 6

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY, APRIL 17, 1948. BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

The Italian people stand between two worlds—the Democratic West and the Communist East—and in this week-end they will indicate to which they wish to belong. The result of the election, however, may not be conclusive. The voting may not give a clear victory to either the Right or the Left, and if the Right gains a majority, or if the leading party requires Left support to form a Government, there may be serious trouble. It is even believed that there is a real possibility of civil war if the Communists do not get their way. Not the Italians alone but the peoples of both West and East will await the results of the election with anxiety. Russia, having been temporarily frustrated in the Dardanelles and in Greece, has been making a determined bid to win Italy for Communism. A Communist Italy would give Russia its badly-needed opening on to the Mediterranean. The pressure of a Communist Italy might also swing the balance in favour of the French Communists, and if Italy and France were lost to the democratic cause, the hopes of a united Western Europe would also fail. It is one of the unfortunate tricks of fate that the long postponed Italian election should now fall at this critical juncture in the relations of the West and the East so that the question of a national Parliament should achieve such international significance to the whole of Europe. It is a question which will be decided by a people who have a high percentage of illiteracy, who have not yet recovered from 20 years of Fascist corruption, and who have ever since the war hung on the brink of economic collapse. In recent weeks the opposing Powers have made obvious moves to win the favour of the Italians. Russia was preparing to advocate the return of Trieste to Italy—for an Italian Trieste in a Communist Italy would not be lost to Russia—but the three Western Powers anticipated the announcement. Moscow has also promised to support the return of the former Italian colonies, but here again France has been ready to meet Italian wishes half way. The United States has let it be known that if Italy returns the Communists to power, she will be regarded as having voted herself out of American aid. There are, however, internal factors which may decide the election. The Communists have placed an attractive land policy before the peasantry, and the Government of Signor de Gasperi has been disappointing in this respect. The basic policy for the reconstruction of Italy has not yet been decided, and the economic and industrial distress consequent on this may favour the Communists. Again, the Christian Democrat Party of Signor de Gasperi will have at this election to face an almost complete alliance of the Socialist and Communist Parties. Anti-cleri-cal feeling has also been stimulated Iby recent scandals in the Vatican. The confidence of two months ago that the Left could not win the election has faded slightly as the voting day has approached. If the Communists gain more than 40 per cent, of the votes the outlook for Italy will be grave. To poll much less than 40 per cent, the Left will have to lose considerable ground, for at the 1946 elections the Communists and Socialists together received very close to this percentage of the votes. TE KOOTI DAYS Up and down the East Coast district of the North Island there are still old Maoris who remember the story of a strange prophecy, the prophecy of the tohunga Toeroa, who foretold that in one year three male children would be born whose careers would affect the Maori people. The lives of the first two would be beneficial and full of good; “in the third there would be evil and calamity.” At the appointed time male children were born to the specified families but, pakeha disease proving more puissant than Maori mana, two died at an early age: the third was named, in accordance with the old priest’s direction, Rikirangi, but history remembers him as Te Kooti, whose career was one of “ evil and calamity” indeed: so evil, in fact, that it is only this week that those of his own people who were outraged by the old rebel’s bloodthirsty excesses have consented to the removal of his bones to his ancestral soil. History has many examples of grim retribution being exacted for unjust sentence, but few to equal that provided by the career of Te Kooti Rikirangi, founder and first priest of the Ringa-tu cult. Arrested without explanation, deported without trial, be was left, during his exile in the Chatham Islands, to brood on his real and imagined injustices, and to seek a path of escape. That the path should have commenced • in mystical introspection and ended in bloodshed and fire was, perhaps, inevitable. Though not of high chiefly rank Te Kooti had an active intelligence. He obtained an elementary education at mission schools and became a proficient reader of the Bible. Spiritually the times were difficult ones for the Maoris. The impact with the miracle of Christianity left them groping in a metaphysical void, and as their enmity with the European invaders —so different from the kindly missionaries—became excited they sought escape in curious and perverted philosophies that were neither wholly Christian nor wholly pagan. The widest-known of these cults was that of Pai-marire, popularly known as Hau-hausim. Te Kooti became familiar with this doctrine when the Hau-haus invaded the East Coast territory in the sixties and later he adopted its Ringa-tu sign—the uplifted hand —as the name for the creed of his own invention. He accompanied the colonial forces in the field against the Hau-haus but was arrested at the siege of Waerenga-a-Hika. No charges were preferred against him —the reasons for his arrest have variously been given as horse-steal-ing and “ communicating with the enemy”—and he was deported to the Chatham Islands, a punishment usually reserved for known rebels. It was in the agony of exile that he developed the queer compound of Judaism, Christianity and Hau-

hauism that some Maoris in the North Island still retain as the Ringa-tu cult. Believing that he would never be permitted to return to the mainland he and his followers seized a schooner and sailed to Poverty Bay, where a tactless attempt to arrest them precipitated a war that is now history and included the dreadful Poverty Bay massacre. Hunted on every mountain trail Te Kooti’s forces dwindled until the priest himself had to seek sanctuary in the Maori King Country and the campaign came to an end. In 1883 he was formally pardoned and permitted to end his days at Ohiwa, in the Bay of Plenty. His name, which the South Island learned only from the reports of the fighting, was a bogey in the north for years. No one member of his race was responsible for the expenditure of so much blood and treasure on the part of the colonial authorities. He fought bravely in his own fashion and though to the end he was despised for such excesses as the Poverty Bay massacre his life remained for many years a sobering reminder to successive governments that injustice in their dealings with the Maori race could produce a terrible harvest.